Unified communications (UC) generally refers to the integration of real-time communication services, such as instant messaging, presence information, telephony, video conferencing, desktop sharing, data sharing, call control, and speech recognition with non-real-time communication services such as unified messaging (e.g., integrated voicemail, email, text message, and facsimile).
Large enterprises deployed with wireless local area networks (WLANs) often use UC suites concomitantly. For example, a company may have a UC suite installed on enterprise computers. Also, enterprises with a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy may allow its employees to install UC suite on their personal mobile devices. The employees can display their presence information, such as, busy, available, away, in a meeting, do not disturb, off work, etc., after they log in to the UC suite.
Accurate display of presence information facilitates communications between users. Presently, some UC suite is able to integrate with another software, such as, an email client software, and update a user's presence information automatically based on information retrieved from the other software. For example, if an employee's email calendar indicates that the employee has a meeting scheduled between 9 am and 10 am in the morning, the UC suite can automatically display the employee's presence status as “in a meeting” between that period of time. In the event that the meeting is canceled and the employee fails to update his or her calendar, the UC suite is prone to display inaccurate information. Enterprise wireless networks, on the other hand, often have real-time accurate information about the user, e.g., user location, user role, etc. Nevertheless, such information has not been previously integrated with UC suite.